September 20, 2012

Luke Skawalker

In high school I used to take the train to The Fireside Bowl after work, and if I had time, a friend and I would hang out outside of a liquor store and get someone to buy us beer, so that I could carry it into the bowling alley in my backpack and we could drink it at the show. The Fireside Bowl was only operating as a bowling alley maybe once a week, if that. Most times, it was a punk rock venue, with filthy walls and trashed tiles hanging from the ceiling from sometimes incredibly forced and hardwon attempts at crowdsurfing, or just general overcompensatory posturing and recklessness.

Right now we are in a muck of all kinds of blip hop and witch house and whatnot, but this genre melting pot concept was more scarce 14 years ago, with one exception, that there was a strange (but relatively huge) "ska core" phenomenon that most people would like to forget.

Luke Skawalker was like the rational extreme to that somewhat hair-brained concept of fusing punk/hardcore music with ska; In recordings, sometimes they seemed serious and innocuous, but there was always something that was so backwards, awful, irrevocably pedestrian, and just plain silly, that made you almost feel guilty for considering liking them. Live, on the other hand, was pretty remarkable.

On one Sunday night in 1998, a couple friends and I went to the Fireside Bowl sight unseen, having no knowledge of who was playing, as usual. The door charge was $3. We walked in to see a band with a vocalist onstage completely covered in some kind of makeshift aluminum foil warlock/gargoyle costume, and one of those tacky sex shop pink elephant thongs. I cracked open a beer, this creature finished a song, and smirkingly asked if anyone wanted a dollar. I said "sure!", and he pulled a dollar bill out of his rear end and gave it to me. Then they staggered through a half baked intro/medley of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" and stopped abruptly in the middle of it for "Pete", the singer, to do some kind of banter about how he had to stuff toilet paper into the elephant trunk of his thong, because his penis wasn't big enough to fill it alone. My words won't do justice to the crazy vibes that Luke Skawalker evoked, but this man's lively and bizarre mode of conception was somehow both cockamamie and captivating to me. His overall demeanor was a mixture of greaser/gas station attendant who was one part good natured, wild eyed Woody Woodpecker and one part psychotic suburban dipsomaniac, and I will never forget it.

Anyhow, after they played what ended up being their last show, Pete autographed the stinky dollar bill, and handed me some tapes right around the same time that someone who'd had a few too many started stripping naked and dry humping the merch tables, causing all of them to fall onto the floor, and a ton of people to steal a lot of their stickers and tapes.

There is a bio of the band online but I thought it was sorely missing this little anecdote. They also have a bandcamp page, and I'm going to include one signature track as a prime example of just how damn awkward Luke Skawalker was. This is from "The Handwerk Tapes" which is a cassette reissue of their "7:06 AM" 7 inch with extras.

Pete, I really enjoyed it. A friend of mine that was there reminded me that your drummer also set his kit on fire and I didn't remember?! You had an incredible stage presence. Awkward is good in this case.

Flavor Downey, I believe there was a gas station or something that sold beer near the California Blue Line stop.